The Pinch Podcast

Sam and Deadbat present the Officially Unofficial Formline Quarter-Season Awards: The Good, the Bad and the Wilder.

We debate United’s best players, worst performances and most baffling moments, with listener categories covering everything from culture carriers to mardiest moments.

All decisions subject to appeal. All appeals will be ignored.

Three spells. Hundreds of appearances. More goals than we’ve got time to count. But Billy Sharp’s Sheffield United story was anything but straightforward.

In the first of a two-part Memory Lane special marking his retirement, Andrew, Sam and Jon Bradley go back to the beginning: the academy prospect sold to Scunthorpe, the remarkable goalscoring explosion that followed, his £2 million return to Bramall Lane and the strange frustration of watching a natural goalscorer seemingly score everywhere except for United.

Watch out! Neil Warnock, Bryan Robson, Kevin Blackwell and Nigel Adkins are about!

Are Sheffield United starting to turn the corner? Two wins in a week beg that question. And now come Derby at Bramall Lane, one of the division’s worst sides, and the sort of fixture that could tell us a fair bit about the floor and the ceiling of this team.

Plus, after being described as a “woke podcast”, we share our feelings with one another.

It’s a bit downbeat this one.

This week on the Formline, we pick through a mixed few days for Sheffield United.

First, the positives from the victory over Lincoln. Well, some negatives too. Then, what went wrong at Portsmouth and whether a performance with 10 men can tell us anything much.

We also look ahead to Bristol City, the latest stop in a run of fixtures that still feels important if United are going to turn an uncertain start into something more convincing.

This week on Hang It in the Louvre, we’re joined by Travelling Blade to choose three images from his life following United.

There’s Billy Sharp, arms outstretched after scoring his first Premier League goal at Bournemouth. There’s a deeply treasured photo from Sunderland away, capturing the friendships and community that have come from following the Blades, including the late Jonny from Shoreham View. And then there’s Chris Basham at Fulham, an image that marks a brutal end of an era.

This week on Formline, we’re looking at the kids.

Who’s actually progressing? Who needs more football? And what counts as young anyway?

We check in on the loanees, including Louie Marsh’s flying start at Chesterfield, Sam Curtis at Cambridge and Jili Buyabu at Rotherham, before turning to the players already around the first team.

Then it’s back to the Championship, as we preview Lincoln at Bramall Lane and ask whether this is the point where United’s kinder run of fixtures finally starts to count.

*Sorry about Sam’s audio quality!

What makes a great chant?

In this episode of Memory Lane, Andrew Hague is joined by Sam Parry and Karl McKenna to dig through Sheffield United’s terrace songbook.

It’s all about how chants spread, why the best ones are often completely spontaneous, which players were blessed with songs far better than they deserved, and why United fans seem physically incapable of keeping the same tempo for more than about 30 seconds.

We reprise this theme again. So, let us know what we’ve missed. And does anyone remember that chant Sam was reaching for at Millwall away at Christmas?

After a few weeks spent asking whether we were being too harsh, or perhaps not harsh enough, this week we’re trying something different.

Positivity. No, really.

With the international break offering some much-needed distance, Sam, Riley and David look for genuine reasons to be cheerful about Sheffield United: returning players, a system that worked last season, a run of fixtures that suddenly looks more inviting, and the possibility that the opening eight games were tougher than they first appeared.

There are caveats, obviously. Quite a lot of them.

But if United are going to change the mood around this season, the next eight games look like a very good place to start.

Every great era eventually ends.

In the final part of our Dave Bassett trilogy, we reach the downfall: relegation from the Premier League and the gradual sense that the spark which had carried United from Division Three to the top flight had fizzled out.

Back-to-back promotions had taken Sheffield United into the top flight. Staying there was another matter entirely.

In part two of our Dave Bassett special, Andrew Hague, Paul, Deadbat and Richard pick up the story with United winless in their first 16 games, seemingly doomed by Christmas and Bassett insisting, against all available evidence, that they would stay up.